Dryopithecus

Definitions

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A genus of extinct anthropoid apes from the Miocene of France, of large size and among the highest simians, regarded by Gervais and Lartet as most closely related to the early ancestors of man. These apes were of nearly human stature, and were probably arboreal and frugivorous.

The sparse remains of Dryopithecus, the species in question, with some few other fossils of doubtfully anthropoid species, save us from a total blank, and open the vista to a myriad of active arboreal creatures which had their dwelling-place in the old-time European forests, but have almost utterly vanished from human knowledge.

M.ocene period, because in the Upper M.ocene deposits of Western Europe remains of two species of ape have been found allied to the gibbons, one of them, Dryopithecus, nearly as large as a man, and believed by M. Lartet to have approached man in its dentition more than the existing apes.

One of these, the Dryopithecus of Lartet, a gibbon or long-armed ape, about equal to man in stature, was obtained in the year 1856 in the Upper Miocene strata at Sansan, near the foot of the Pyrenees in the South of France, and one bone of the same ape is reported to have been since procured from a deposit of corresponding age at Eppelsheim, near Darmstadt, in a latitude answering to that of the southern counties of England.